For any business, data is a valuable resource that helps increase its competitive advantage and overall customer experience. Proper data handling and precision are vital for effective business functions, be it sales, marketing, or other day-to-day processes. With data management software, your business can store and manage data easily, and use it for reporting and BI activities.
According to a report, businesses produce nearly 2.5 Quintilian bytes of information every single day. It’s imperative for companies to properly manage valuable bytes of data. After all, this data, whether unstructured or structured, can be used to shape business processes.
Managing this data manually is a hassle. This is where data management software steps in.
Effectively managing data is the primary step in generating accurate analytics because without precise and properly managed data deriving insights is not possible. Moreover, businesses that properly manage organizational data have witnessed a revenue increase by 12%, signifying a strong relationship between data management and ROI.
In this article, we’ll explain the basics of a data management solution. We’ll also cover some of its key features and common use-cases. Lastly, we’ll look at some important considerations to help you choose the right data management software for your business.
What is a Data Management Software?
A data management software is a program that combines and manages data from numerous data sources. It extracts, cleans, transforms, and integrates data without compromising on integrity so that you can access it in an easy-to-use format.
Data management software is used to fulfill critical business objectives like data integration, extraction, warehousing, virtualization, etc. The software’s capability to handle various kinds of queries plays a crucial role in refining data according to the business requirements.
The responsibility of managing data doesn’t just rely on the IT team. It’s a business decision that can improve and support all facets of your company. That’s why data management software is essential in getting the most out of your enterprise information. It helps minimize human error and offers a secure way for all users to access and utilize data whenever they want.
Features of a Data Management Software
Here are some of the main features of a data management software that help identify and fix inaccuracies and errors in data, make enhancements, and carry out actionable data analysis.
A data management software can help identify and fill gaps in missing information, and decrease redundancy that would otherwise impact the precision of analytics.
A data management software gives you control over data, which means that you can quickly identify when and how data has altered. It also enables you to create alerts, so you are promptly notified about any changes.
By using features like tokenization, encryption, and access control in a data management software, you can secure access to your enterprise data and protect it from breaches.
A data management software allows an organization to employ controlled processes for accessing, integrating, and storing data, throughout the data journey, to minimize data risks.
Using trigger-based features like job scheduling, you can automate the repetitive tasks in a workflow and optimize the data management process.
Data Management Software Use-Cases
Data management software has a wide range of use-cases, extending to various industry verticals. Some of them are listed here:
Data management software can consolidate data stored in different systems into a data warehouse to simplify reporting and analytics. Data warehousing transforms information into data and makes it easily accessible to you.
Advanced data management solutions support warehousing use cases through advanced functionalities, such as data mining, data modeling, auto-mapping, etc. and providing connection to a diverse range of sources, including unstructured and structured.
Data management software for analytics use cases are designed to support analytical processing. The primary purpose of data analytics is to understand trends in the organization or industry, enabling you to make knowledgeable decisions independently.
A data management software can help you obtain high-level insights via modeling, planning, and trend analysis so that your teams can identify trends and estimate business models using data.
Compliance regulations all over the world are changing as rapidly as information. Using a data management software, organizations can maintain regulatory compliance according to the data privacy laws.
Data governance is the process of employing the best industry practices, policies, and roles to set frameworks so that data is gathered and stored reliably, safely, and effectively. A data management solution helps organization secure data by defining user-defined roles and enabling authorization access.
How to Choose the Right Data Management Software
Here are a few considerations to help you choose the right data management solution for your organization:
Data Cleansing and Rectification
A data management software should offer support for cleaning and rectifying data by resolving any quality issues, improving consistency, and removing redundancy. Transformations like data profiling, data quality rules, and data cleansing can help accomplish these tasks.
Data Consolidation
The ability to consolidate data from several source systems into one central repository is what makes a data management solution imperative for an organization. It should allow seamless and automated data collection from heterogeneous systems and data formats (such as PDF, COBOL, delimited, etc.).
User-Friendly Interface
A data management solution should have an easy-to-use and intuitive interface so that even your non-technical staff can use it whenever needed. Also, it should provide a single interface to manage all your data. You should be able to identify what data is personal and classify multiple data types from one platform.
Integration and Connectivity
A data management solution should allow easy integration with other tools and software, such as Salesforce, so that you can simplify data management. Moreover, it should support collaboration among teams so that your business users can tweak processes, evaluate results, and update data themselves.
Scalability
Business expansion brings with it more data that needs to be managed and analyzed. Thus, a data management solution should allow you the flexibility to quickly address your developing business needs by offering scalable features and functionalities.
Data Backup, Recovery, and Downtime
It should offer data backup and disaster recovery features so that you can easily access and retrieve data in case of failure or any other event. Moreover, you should be able to easily modify data or carry out regular upgrades with no disruption or downtime.
Cost
When choosing a data management solution, the cost is an important consideration. Several data management software available in the market offer flexible pricing plans, some of which also offer free trials.
Final Words
An increasing number of businesses today recognize opportunities and advantages offered by data. However, many of them fail to employ a system that can acquire these advantages.
By taking the time to evaluate your requirements and finding the right data management software, you can improve your organization’s efficiency and communication (both internal and external), and decrease your business, operational, and compliance risks. Eventually, you can shrink the expenses and increase the bottom line.
A data management software can help you acquire detailed analysis that’ll change the face of your business. It can radically transform your business for the better. From superior decision-making to lowering the costs of IT, it provides you with more accurate and consistent data that can be easily accessed via a user-friendly interface with drag-and-drop functionality.
Originally published at https://www.astera.com on November 4, 2019.
